Today I was dining with a number of my fellow grad students when a bicycle pulled up beside us. The make was something called a "Quantum Race," which is an amusing thing to call a bike that pulls up next to a group of physicists. Apparently it was manufactured by a company called "Klein," which is almost appropriate*.
But it does leave me to wonder ( Read more... )

I really wish that that shop would finish repairs on my bike. I promise to keep the tires pumped-up every week from now on! Of course, with Leah coming here next week, I may or may not be able to use it very often. Unless, of course, she gets one of her own...

I must admit, I'm very concerned about the situation in America at the moment. Not just because the US government cutting spending by 40% overnight will pretty much murder the world economy, but because the majority of the electorate don't know just how deep they are in shit. Why are they wasting time talking about marriage, or religion or banning ( Read more... )

So even in spite of all of the stress surrounding my presentations last year, I think I'm going to apply for a lecturing job in the coming semester. Why? Because (first of all) there will be no professors present to take sadistic glee out of trying to trip me up and secondly because anything would be better than another year speant marking.

Step 1: Say something controversial and liable to offend:
e.g. "People who don't want to have sex should see a psychologist. If someone said that they were disgusted by the idea of eating or sleeping, we would not show any tolerance for that! There's probably some kind of a psychological cause for it, because everybody likes having sex. Tolerance ( Read more... )

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I would like to propose a new word: "FEID" (pronounced "fie'd"). This is of course an initialism for False Equivalence in the Interests of Diplomacy. It applies whenever you knowingly claim that two inequivalent things are (morally and/or factually) equivalent in order to avoid offending anyone.
A good example would be if you have two political ( Read more... )

What do you get a three year old for her birthday? Jason has invited everyone to his daughter's birthday (which is a bit weird, I am told, but perhaps none of his friends have children) and I can't really remember any of the gifts I was given before age 4. I suspect Jason would hate me forever if I got her anything that made noise when the button ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I sat down to write a simple story about full-body transplants. My primary inspiration was the hilariously-bad early 60s B-Movie The Brain That Wouldn't Die (not to be confused with other, equally hilariously-bad, but far less inspirational, full-body transplant B-movies such as Monstrosity: The Atomic Brain!). Basically, I wanted ( Read more... )

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Okay, obviously this is just a preliminary draft. And it has not yet been submitted for peer review. But yeah! It's a paper! With my name on it! And for which I did most of the work!